The Firefox project began as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project by Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross. They believed the commercial requirements of Netscape's sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser.[20] To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite's software bloat, they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite. On April 3, 2003, the Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird.[21]
Good luck with that... it seems as though the old-school Mozilla fans have sneakily come back to power, and they're dragging Firefox down the same ill-fated path that it was going when everyone jumped ship to Firefox. Ironically, it seems as though we need a new spinoff in order to get back to basics, stop people from bloating the main program with useless features, and get rid of the corporate assholes.
I'd jump ship to Opera or Chrome, but neither really appeals all that much to me. I want a browser with a fucking status bar, and none of the current generation seem to offer this simple feature.
OS-9 is a family of real-time, process-based, multitasking, multi-user, Unix-like operating systems, developed in the 1980s, originally by Microware Systems Corporation for the Motorola 6809 microprocessor. It is currently owned by RadiSys Corporation.
OS9 was a wickedly cool operating system, which could multitask surprisingly well on the Motorola 6809. While never quite what you might call "mainstream", it was popular with some hobbyists. A friend of mine showed off his TRS-80 running OS9 once, and I was suitably impressed, even though I had an Amiga and an 80386 PC running OS/2, both of which were obviously more advanced. It was a very powerful, sleek system that probably should have caught on more than it did.
Of course, there was also GEOS, the Amiga OS, the Atari ST, and OS/2, but those came a bit later than OS9 (which dates back to 1979!). I still have fond memories of my Amiga, the massive flamewars of Amiga vs Atari, and the poor Apple fanboys with their black and white OS that barely even multitasked.
Yes, I'll grant you that. However, most people simply don't care. They're apathetic about privacy issues, and I'm apathetic about baby pictures. So, they use social media and I don't. You could make a good argument that they don't understand the scope or consequences of these privacy invasions, but I've given up on trying to change the minds of compulsive sharers. It's like trying to explain to a compulsive hoarder why anyone would ever want to purchase digital media. It's an alien concept, and you're never going to reach them. You might as well stop preaching at them and let them enjoy their deviancy.
A) Be horrified by the privacy implications of putting all this personal information on the internet, of our own free will or B) Laugh at the people who chose A, and smugly congratulate ourselves for not having done so.
Either way, it generates more pageviews for slashdot.
Most of their games were published by third parties, and they haven't had a #1 mega-hit in a while (unless Doom 3 did better than I thought), but id still counts. I'm not necessarily saying that self-publishing a game is a viable strategy, either, but there is historical precedent for a small indie developer to self-publish and rake in millions. For what it's worth, id software chose not to self-publish Quake, which makes me wonder if maybe self-publishing Doom was more of a hassle or headache than it was worth.
Personally, if I were Bill Gates and John Carmack asked me for a billion dollar advance, I'd probably give it to him. But that's just me. I'm kind of crazy.
And, yet, if this had something to do with lego, there would be legions of Slashdotters defending it, saying that you "don't get it", if you ask why it was done.
I doubt it's much worse than people messing with the stereo or trying to read maps. Both are extremely frustrating to see in other drivers, but it's not like this is the first time that someone in a car has had the potential to be distracted by shiny toys. Anyways, it's probably more for the benefit of the passenger than the driver. I've often thought that such technology was long due, and I welcome the future. Plus, if millions of people end up dead on the highways, the free market will surely solve the problem. Remember, government regulation is bad and never works!
Google is like the socially retarded neighbor who hires a private investigator to fully investigate you, to find out what the best housewarming gift would be. You might be a slight bit conflicted as to how to feel, given the circumstances. It's definitely creepy, but one could conceivably argue that it's done to give you a better experience. I'm not sure I buy that, but I'm trying to be open-minded.
Amusing. However, one could easily charge the child who cries out, "The Emperor is naked!" to be guilty of the same thing. Although, perhaps there'd need to be a certain exasperated grumpiness. Let's replace the child with a grouchy old man who forgot to take his medication.
I agree, but we're apparently in the extreme minority. Sometimes I wonder if I'm missing out by not having a Facebook page, an iPhone/Android, meaningless sex with chicks from bars, and a big screen television that gets 2000 channels. Then I usually come to my senses and start to hate that shit again.
If you actually take the time to look, progressives in the 18th century (and, rarely, earlier) were discussing at length the health risks of tobacco smoking, the inhumanity of slavery, feminism and women's suffrage, socialism, anarchism, democracy, republicanism, and the dehumanizing effects of a modern, technological society. Granted, some of these people might have been branded crackpots, heretics, or vile traitors, but they were out there.
I do not support the philosophical position that we can not judge past societies. I believe the opposite, in fact. If my beliefs turn out to have been racist in origin, then I fully accept that future generations will judge me as a racist. So, too, should the rest of society be judged.
Open source altruism aside, i want a stable, flexible, fast-booting BIOS. The standard BIOS that comes with most motherboards is awful, and is frequently missing important features.
What's so wrong with your motherboard's BIOS? What features is it missing?
What brand and model motherboard do you have? I'm predicting it's not an Asus board, because Asus has awesome BIOSes.
"All video codecs are covered by patents," Mr. Jobs wrote. "Unfortunately, just because something is open-source, it doesn't mean or guarantee that it doesn't infringe on others patents."
This seems like a reasonable statement, at first, but then I wondered what makes video codecs so special. I mean, why single them out, when almost anything has at least the possibility of infringing on a patent? I think that's pretty much the point of having a patent pool, these days. If someone claims that you're infringing on their patents, you can search through your collection of thousands of patents, in order to find something that they are infringing upon.
Now, I'm not necessarily an anarchist wanting to abolish intellectual property, but I do believe that patents have become an embarrassing travesty, thanks to the past fifteen or twenty years' worth of crappy patents (which are just now beginning to fall out of protection). When you can't even write an open video codec without industry insiders calling into question your very algorithms, there's something wrong, be it with the insiders (spreading FUD in order to kill the competition) or the laws (which have made competition impossible).
Anyways, I'm sure a hundred other people will say the same thing, since this is Slashdot, and we looove to complain about intellectual property laws, so I'll add a little something extra: what I've thought about as a replacement for our current system. How's this sound?
First, let's upgrade the patent clerks to "patent engineers", because that's what they should be, with appropriate qualifications and salary. I'm sure we can find the funds to lure some qualified engineers away from big business, and, if we can't, we could always steal a few away from the Armed Forces. Sounds like a pretty comfy retirement for a knowledgeable engineer, to me.
Second, let's remove all the legalese and obfuscation from the applications. If it's not clear and concise, reject it. If it doesn't narrow down the scope to laser precision, reject it. If it sounds like a lawyer wrote it, rather than an engineer, reject it. The default action should generally be to reject, seeing as patent are supposed to be novel.
I was always told you couldn't patent an idea. Well, it seems as though you can... if it's implemented on the internet! Come on. That's stupid. I'm willing to compromise on algorithms, formulas, and other mathematical discoveries (though I dispute their status as inventions), in order to fight against patents that are even more offensive than algorithms, but they should be, again, so narrowly focused that you'd know you were infringing on someone's patent, rather than stumbling on it by accident. One doesn't accidentally re-implement LZW, MP3, or JPEG compression. On the other hand, everyone has, at one point, thought, "If I had a single click checkout button, that would make this whole process much easier." Bezos was simply enough of an asshole to go to the bother of patenting his idea. LZW? Patentable. One click checkout? Not patentable. As distasteful as I might find patenting algorithms, it does force people to stop patenting stupidity like Amazon's patent portfolio, which is composed of "good ideas", not machines or algorithms. Since patented algorithms are probably here to stay, we might as well use them to purge the even more offensive patents.
Patents should have a clear owner. No owner means no patent. If you make a good faith effort to contact the owner of a patent, with the intention of licensing it, then I'd say you've done all you can. Keeping your patent documentation up-to-date is your burden, not anyone else's.
Patents should be encouraged to have a short lifetime. The amount of protection offered should be inversely related to how much freedom is reserved by the patent holder. For example, a patent on a new type of electronic lock might last 3
Go to a news aggregator site, such as Fark or sometimes Google News. Open 50-100 links in new tabs,
What the hell is wrong with people like you? Why do you do that? My ex-girlfriend did that, and it perplexed me to no end. Stop doing that. I bet you're the kind of person who drives 150 mph and then complains that it's hard to steer.
It would be interesting if everyone got a chance to try out their pet sociological/political theories, but I think we're probably better off without some of those theories being put to the test. Not that it wouldn't be fun saying, "I told you so!", but the loss of human life would be quite regrettable.
Slashdot Mirror
I always knew they had something against me...
I must have been thinking of Chrome. Time to download Opera again.
Bullshit.
Mozilla was bloated and slow.
From Wikipedia:
There ya go. Citations and all.
Good luck with that... it seems as though the old-school Mozilla fans have sneakily come back to power, and they're dragging Firefox down the same ill-fated path that it was going when everyone jumped ship to Firefox. Ironically, it seems as though we need a new spinoff in order to get back to basics, stop people from bloating the main program with useless features, and get rid of the corporate assholes.
I'd jump ship to Opera or Chrome, but neither really appeals all that much to me. I want a browser with a fucking status bar, and none of the current generation seem to offer this simple feature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS9
OS9 was a wickedly cool operating system, which could multitask surprisingly well on the Motorola 6809. While never quite what you might call "mainstream", it was popular with some hobbyists. A friend of mine showed off his TRS-80 running OS9 once, and I was suitably impressed, even though I had an Amiga and an 80386 PC running OS/2, both of which were obviously more advanced. It was a very powerful, sleek system that probably should have caught on more than it did.
Of course, there was also GEOS, the Amiga OS, the Atari ST, and OS/2, but those came a bit later than OS9 (which dates back to 1979!). I still have fond memories of my Amiga, the massive flamewars of Amiga vs Atari, and the poor Apple fanboys with their black and white OS that barely even multitasked.
Yes, I'll grant you that. However, most people simply don't care. They're apathetic about privacy issues, and I'm apathetic about baby pictures. So, they use social media and I don't. You could make a good argument that they don't understand the scope or consequences of these privacy invasions, but I've given up on trying to change the minds of compulsive sharers. It's like trying to explain to a compulsive hoarder why anyone would ever want to purchase digital media. It's an alien concept, and you're never going to reach them. You might as well stop preaching at them and let them enjoy their deviancy.
I think that the idea is that we're supposed to
A) Be horrified by the privacy implications of putting all this personal information on the internet, of our own free will
or
B) Laugh at the people who chose A, and smugly congratulate ourselves for not having done so.
Either way, it generates more pageviews for slashdot.
Most of their games were published by third parties, and they haven't had a #1 mega-hit in a while (unless Doom 3 did better than I thought), but id still counts. I'm not necessarily saying that self-publishing a game is a viable strategy, either, but there is historical precedent for a small indie developer to self-publish and rake in millions. For what it's worth, id software chose not to self-publish Quake, which makes me wonder if maybe self-publishing Doom was more of a hassle or headache than it was worth.
Personally, if I were Bill Gates and John Carmack asked me for a billion dollar advance, I'd probably give it to him. But that's just me. I'm kind of crazy.
id software.
And, yet, if this had something to do with lego, there would be legions of Slashdotters defending it, saying that you "don't get it", if you ask why it was done.
That's ironic.
Rule #0 of the Internet: "If you're on the internet, you're on the autistic spectrum."
I firmly believe this.
I doubt it's much worse than people messing with the stereo or trying to read maps. Both are extremely frustrating to see in other drivers, but it's not like this is the first time that someone in a car has had the potential to be distracted by shiny toys. Anyways, it's probably more for the benefit of the passenger than the driver. I've often thought that such technology was long due, and I welcome the future. Plus, if millions of people end up dead on the highways, the free market will surely solve the problem. Remember, government regulation is bad and never works!
Google is like the socially retarded neighbor who hires a private investigator to fully investigate you, to find out what the best housewarming gift would be. You might be a slight bit conflicted as to how to feel, given the circumstances. It's definitely creepy, but one could conceivably argue that it's done to give you a better experience. I'm not sure I buy that, but I'm trying to be open-minded.
No, that's the way autistic people are.
Amusing. However, one could easily charge the child who cries out, "The Emperor is naked!" to be guilty of the same thing. Although, perhaps there'd need to be a certain exasperated grumpiness. Let's replace the child with a grouchy old man who forgot to take his medication.
I agree, but we're apparently in the extreme minority. Sometimes I wonder if I'm missing out by not having a Facebook page, an iPhone/Android, meaningless sex with chicks from bars, and a big screen television that gets 2000 channels. Then I usually come to my senses and start to hate that shit again.
That video requires you to log in to YouTube. Got a link that doesn't require an account to view the video?
No, I don't agree with that at all.
If you actually take the time to look, progressives in the 18th century (and, rarely, earlier) were discussing at length the health risks of tobacco smoking, the inhumanity of slavery, feminism and women's suffrage, socialism, anarchism, democracy, republicanism, and the dehumanizing effects of a modern, technological society. Granted, some of these people might have been branded crackpots, heretics, or vile traitors, but they were out there.
I do not support the philosophical position that we can not judge past societies. I believe the opposite, in fact. If my beliefs turn out to have been racist in origin, then I fully accept that future generations will judge me as a racist. So, too, should the rest of society be judged.
Oh, definitely! I'm glad someone caught the reference.
Open source altruism aside, i want a stable, flexible, fast-booting BIOS. The standard BIOS that comes with most motherboards is awful, and is frequently missing important features.
What's so wrong with your motherboard's BIOS? What features is it missing?
What brand and model motherboard do you have? I'm predicting it's not an Asus board, because Asus has awesome BIOSes.
This seems like a reasonable statement, at first, but then I wondered what makes video codecs so special. I mean, why single them out, when almost anything has at least the possibility of infringing on a patent? I think that's pretty much the point of having a patent pool, these days. If someone claims that you're infringing on their patents, you can search through your collection of thousands of patents, in order to find something that they are infringing upon.
Now, I'm not necessarily an anarchist wanting to abolish intellectual property, but I do believe that patents have become an embarrassing travesty, thanks to the past fifteen or twenty years' worth of crappy patents (which are just now beginning to fall out of protection). When you can't even write an open video codec without industry insiders calling into question your very algorithms, there's something wrong, be it with the insiders (spreading FUD in order to kill the competition) or the laws (which have made competition impossible).
Anyways, I'm sure a hundred other people will say the same thing, since this is Slashdot, and we looove to complain about intellectual property laws, so I'll add a little something extra: what I've thought about as a replacement for our current system. How's this sound?
Yeah, I'm going to say that this is a hoax.
Urine control? It's too much
And we thought that FF 3.x was underwhelming, with the awfulbar. If only we could have seen what was coming in the next release...
What the hell is wrong with people like you? Why do you do that? My ex-girlfriend did that, and it perplexed me to no end. Stop doing that. I bet you're the kind of person who drives 150 mph and then complains that it's hard to steer.
It would be interesting if everyone got a chance to try out their pet sociological/political theories, but I think we're probably better off without some of those theories being put to the test. Not that it wouldn't be fun saying, "I told you so!", but the loss of human life would be quite regrettable.